Guiding Light of The Month

Grant, O Divine Teacher, that we may know and accomplish our mission upon earth better and better, more and more, that we may make full use of all the energies that are in us, and Thy sovereign Presence become manifest ever more perfectly in the silent depths of our soul, in all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our actions.
- The Mother

“The power of money is at present under the influence or in the hands of the forces andbeings of the vital world. It is because of this influence that you never see money going in any considerable amount to the cause of Truth. Always it goes astray, because it is in the clutch of the hostile forces and is one of the principal means by which they keep their grip upon the earth. The hold of the hostile forces upon money power is powerfully, completely and thoroughly organized and to extract anything out of this compact organization is a most difficult task. Each time that you try to draw a little of this money away from its present custodians, you have to undertake a fierce battle.”

It is often said in fairy tales that a treasure is guarded by serpents. Is this true?

Yes, but it is not a physical serpent, it is a vital serpent. The key to the treasures of is in the vital world and it is guarded by an immense black serpent - a tremendous serpent, ten times, fifty times larger than an ordinary one. It keeps the gates of the treasure. It is magnificent, black, always erect and awake. I happened once to be standing before it (usually these beings obey me when I give them an order), and I said to it, “Let me pass”. It replied,” I would willingly let you pass, but if I do, they will kill me; so I cannot let you pass.” I asked “What must I bring you in order to gain entrance?” It said, “Oh, only one thing would oblige me to give way to you: If you could become master of the sex impulse in man, if you succeeded in conquering that in humanity, I could no longer resist, I would allow you to pass”.

It has not yet allowed me to pass, I must admit that I have not fulfilled the condition; I have not been able to obtain such a mastery of it as to conquer it in all men.

Wealth is a force- I have already told you this once- a force of Nature; and it should be a means of circulation, a power in movement, as flowing water is a power in movement. It is something which can serve to produce, to organize. It is a convenient means, because in fact it is only a means of making things circulate fully and freely.

This force should be in the hands of those who know how to make the best possible use of it, that is, as I said at the beginning, people who have abolished in themselves or in some way or other got rid of every personal desire and every attachment. To this should be added a vision vast enough to understand the needs of the earth, a knowledge complete enough to know how to organize all these needs and use this force by these means.

If besides these, these beings have a higher spiritual knowledge, then they can utilize this force to construct gradually upon the earth what will be capable of manifesting the divine Power, Force, Grace. And then this power of money, wealth, this financial force, of which I just said that it was like a curse, would become a supreme blessing for the good of all.

Q: Money is the visible sign of a universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is indispensable to the fullness of the outer life. In its origin and its true action it belongs to the Divine. But like other powers of the Divine it is delegated here and in the ignorance of the lower Nature can be usurped for the uses of the ego or held by Asuric influences and perverted to their purpose. This is indeed one of the three forces- power, wealth, sex- that have the strongest attraction for the human ego and the Asura and are most generally misheld and misused by those who retain them. For this reason most spiritual disciplines proclaim poverty and bareness of life as the only spiritual condition. But this is an error; it leaves the power in the hands of the hostile forces. To reconquer it for the Divine to whom it belongs and use it divinely for the divine life is the supramental way for the sadhaka.

– Sri Aurobindo, in “The Mother”

How can money be reconquered for the Divine?

A: Ah.. There is a hint here. Three things are interdependent (Sri Aurobindo says here): power, money and sex. I believe the three are interdependent and that all three have to be conquered to be sure of having any one- when you want to conquer one you must have the other two. Unless one has mastered these three things, desire for power, desire for money and desire for sex, one cannot truly possess any of them firmly and surely. What gives so great an importance to money in the world as it is today is not so much money itself, for apart from a few fools who heap up money and are happy because they can heap it up and count it, generally money is desired and acquired for the satisfactions it brings. And this is reciprocal: each of these three things not only has its own value in the world of desires, but leans upon the other two. I have related to you that vision, that black serpent which kept watch over the riches of the world, terrestrial wealth- he demanded the mastery of the sex impulse. Because, according to certain theories, the very need of power has its end in this satisfaction, and if one mastered that, if one abolished that from human consciousness, much of the need for power and desire for money would disappear automatically. Evidently, these are the three great obstacles in the terrestrial human life and, unless they are conquered, there is scarcely a chance for humanity to change.

For all we have acquired soon loses worth,An old disvalued credit in Times’s bank,Imperfection’s cheque drawn on the Inconscient.An inconsequence dogs every effort made,And chaos waits on every cosmos made:In each success a seed of failure lurks.He saw the doubtfulness of all things here,The incertitude of man’s proud confident thought,The transience of the achievements of his force.A thinking being in an unthinking world,An island in the sea of the Unknown,He is a smallness trying to be great,An animal with some instincts of a god,His life is a story too common to be told,His deeds a number summing up to nought,His consciousness a torch lit to be quenched,His hope a star above a cradle and grave.And yet a greater destiny may be his,For the eternal spirit is his truth,He can re-create himself and all aroundAnd fashion new the world in which he lives:He, ignorant , is the Knower beyond Time,He is the Self above Nature, above Fate.

(“Savitri”, Book 1, Canto 5)

A greater truth than earth’s shall roof-in earthAnd shed its sunlight on the roads of mind;A power infallible shall lead the thought,A seeing Puissance govern life and act,In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal’s fire.A soul shall wake in the Inconscient’s house;The mind shall be God-vision’s tabernacle,The body intuition’s instrument,And life a channel for God’s visible power.All earth shall be the Spirit’s manifest home,Hidden no more by the body and the life,Hidden no more by the mind’s ignorance;An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.

The English word ‘money’ meaning ‘coinage’ or ‘metal currency’ was derived from the French word ‘moneie’ which in turn was derived from the Latin ‘moneta’. Interestingly, Moneta means ‘she who warns’ a title bestowed upon the Roman Goddess Juno in or near whose temple in Rome money was coined. Money appears to have been in circulation during the Sumerian period and whose economics was later refined by the Babylonians with rules on debt, legal contracts and law codes. Prior to this, some 100,000 years ago, history has it that proto money was in circulation, in Swaziland, facilitating the exchange of mutually favoured items between a “buyer” and a “seller”, an exchange known as barter. Many items served as proto-money, like shells and metals and wheat, peppercorn and maize. Later on, the arbitrary use of items was replaced by metals of standard weights as items to be used in exchange for another item. This helped to address the problem of ‘coincidence of wants’. Money as commodity evolved.

A glance at a collection of coins and notes from various countries reveals how each country’s pride in its nationhood or sovereignty is embossed in the motives that are printed on currencies, encompassing its history, its language and its national prides. The symbolism suggests the great importance accorded to money from the highest rungs of society. Each currency is valued against the nation’s economic strength, its lure of investments and its production power.

What about money in an individual’s life? It is this material, money, that fetches food for survival, clothing and shelter, the basic needs of life. It is money that guarantees that little pleasures are taken care of, the little extras of vanity, that little extra that makes one look fashionable, the little bit more of that special bite, that little bit more of convenience to rest our limbs, that little more of comfort and coziness, whichever niche of the world we occupy, even if momentarily. It does not take long to realise that money and the fulfillment of desires are close cousins. The very invitation to think about what money may mean to one, is troubling. It may be troubling because something within resists a revamp of the structure that one has built with money and all the comforts it has helped one to build around oneself.

Money is generally viewed as a material. However, there is an alternate way of viewing our relationship with money. The Mother suggests that money is also a “force” with power behind it, power to make and break, to build and destroy. This then depends on the wielder of this instrument called money. Who is he who is given the use of money ? What drives his motivations, what is his highest need in life? These will determine how he uses this force, money.

We are troubled over the money world of current times, the way it has wound itself into a destructive tension or unwound itself into disarray and breakdown. But how could we have motivated, fueled this chaos (at least as it stands to date) in the money market, with our sets of values on what is important to us?

Some may view money as a curse. Not The Mother. She says that money can become a blessing instead of the curse it now appears to be in many ways. We are left to fathom the knots and tangles and to find a connectedness, between our seemingly unending impulses of desire, their somewhat partial fulfillment and the vehement cry for more and also the real possibility of transcending this state of affairs into freedom from the clutches of this power and to use it in that freedom instead, far removed from personal, narrow, short-sighted gains.

This, one is invited to do without going far; by taking a dive deep down, discovering and recognising first the knots and tangles and then the prime need of one’s life and after that, inquiring into the possible snowball effects of our money moves in every corner of the earth. Read on.